Progressive Labor Party (PLP) fights to destroy capitalism and the dictatorship of the capitalist class. We organize workers, soldiers and youth into a revolutionary movement for communism.
Only the dictatorship of the working class — communism — can provide a lasting solution to the disaster that is today’s world for billions of people. This cannot be done through electoral politics, but requires a revolutionary movement and a mass Red Army led by PLP.
Worldwide capitalism, in its relentless drive for profit, inevitably leads to war, fascism, poverty, disease, starvation and environmental destruction. The capitalist class, through its state power — governments, armies, police, schools and culture — maintains a dictatorship over the world’s workers. The capitalist dictatorship supports, and is supported by, the anti-working-class ideologies of racism, sexism, nationalism, individualism and religion.
While the bosses and their mouthpieces claim “communism is dead,” capitalism is the real failure for billions worldwide. Capitalism returned to Russia and China because socialism retained many aspects of the profit system, like wages and privileges. Russia and China did not establish communism.
Communism means working collectively to build a worker-run society. We will abolish work for wages, money and profits. Everyone will share in society’s benefits and burdens.
Communism means abolishing racism and the concept of “race.” Capitalism uses racism to super-exploit black, Latino, Asian and indigenous workers, and to divide the entire working class.
Communism means abolishing the special oppression of women — sexism — and divisive gender roles created by the class society.
Communism means abolishing nations and nationalism. One international working class, one world, one Party.
Communism means that the minds of millions of workers must become free from religion’s false promises, unscientific thinking and poisonous ideology. Communism will triumph when the masses of workers can use the science of dialectical materialism to understand, analyze and change the world to meet their needs and aspirations.
Communism means the Party leads every aspect of society. For this to work, millions of workers — eventually everyone — must become communist organizers. Join Us!
Friday, December 18, 2020 at 5:55PM OAKLAND, CA, December 5—Motorcycle, bike and skateboard riders led a caravan of 125 Oakland tenants in cars today, stopping traffic and chanting “Fight, fight, fight – housing is a human right!”
This “Rally on Wheels” united multiple tenants’ unions into an Oakland-wide force calling for rent cancellation and guaranteed housing for the homeless.
Friday, December 18, 2020 at 5:54PM LOS ANGELES, December 16—Housing is a necessity, but under capitalism, workers’ needs are never guaranteed. As communists, we must organize to demand the needs of our class to be met! Through that process, workers will see the limitations of these struggles and have the potential to understand the change they want can only come through communism.
Friday, December 18, 2020 at 5:54PM EL SALVADOR, December 16— More than one hundred women working for Florenzi Industries are occupying the building of this business in Soyapango, in the San Salvador industrial area. These workers took direct action, occupying their workplace since July 2020 when Florenzi closed its doors due to Covid-19. owner, Sergio Pineda, refused to pay the workers for four months of labor, including benefits and vacation time.
On March 18 President Bukele ordered the shutdown of 152 maquilas for four months. Pineda, the capitalist and owner of Florenzi Industries, took advantage of the presidential decree to close the factory without paying about $500,000 dollars that he owes the workers. Even worse, he did not pay for the forced confinement due to the pandemic.
Friday, December 18, 2020 at 5:53PM MEXICO, December 16—In Mexico, like the rest of the world, the coronavirus has exposed the weakness and chaos of capitalism. Officially 1.3 million people have been infected and 130,000 have died. Unofficial reporting has the numbers up to three times higher. This health crisis shows the inability of the capitalist system to meet the needs of the working class. The wealthy have been weathering the storm in relative security while the working class has been dying. Clearly it is not Covid-19, but capitalism that is the biggest threat. The government of President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO), like the rest of the capitalists, are paralyzed by the system they rule over. Only a communist society will provide the kind of care the working-class needs. Simply feeding people so they could stay home instead of working would have saved countless lives and stopped the spread of the disease. Instead paralysis and confusion has been the response of the ruling class.
Friday, December 18, 2020 at 5:51PM Huge portions of today’s protests (see editorial, page 2) have been dominated by red flags of the Indian Communist Party (CPI). But if communists of the 1940s had been able to win a communist future, the misery leading to the 2020 protests would not exist. Where did India’s communist movement go wrong?
The question is of immediate concern. As workers across the globe continue to face lose-lose electoral choices like the 2020 U.S. presidential election there is a constant pressure to side with ‘lesser evil’ capitalists. A brief look at the history of the Indian Communist Party shows us the deadly error of seeking unity with any capitalists.
Friday, December 18, 2020 at 5:50PM PAKISTAN, December 16—High inflation of wheat and sugar; low wages and factory closures. The working class has been forced into the streets, chanting against the brutal capitalist system which is producing poverty, unemployment, nationalism, and other horrors. Progressive Labor Party (PLP) is spreading class-consciousness among workers associated with different trade union organizations, government employees’ organizations, student unions, and more. We are striving to bring communist politics in practice.
Friday, December 18, 2020 at 5:49PM Under capitalism profit comes before all and at the expense of workers’ lives. During a global pandemic that has left many workers unemployed and starving, the bosses and their mouth pieces are working overtime to hide their present day agricultural atrocities.
Progressive Labor Party (PLP) however, wants to remind workers that with communist revolution we will bring back the collectivization of agriculture - a practice that ensures sufficient production to feed the entire working class.
Friday, December 18, 2020 at 5:48PM Friedrich Engels, the comrade in arms of Karl Marx, was born on November 28, 1820, in Barmen, Germany. His father was a textile manufacturer, a reactionary and religious man. He forced young Engels into a commercial apprenticeship, first in his own company, then in another. Despite his reluctance, Engels mastered this profession.
In 1841-2, Engels did voluntary military service in Berlin where he could attend lectures at the university. There he made contact with liberal, anarchist and left-Hegelian circles, and studied military science. In 1842, he began work in his father’s cotton mill in Manchester, England. Engels would go after work into the working-class neighborhoods where he saw the misery of the proletariat. He got to know English labor leaders and married an Irish worker, Mary Burns.
Workers of Manchester made Engels a communist
Engels read everything that had been written about the situation of the English working class and carefully studied available official documents. Engels came to understand that it is their dire economic situation that drives workers to fight for their liberation. However, liberation from capitalism will only happen if the working class consciously sets it as its goal. At the age of 25, Engels published The Condition of the Working Class in England. As early as 1844, he had published Outline of a Critique of Political Economy in Franco-German Yearbooks where Marx also worked. Contact with Engels was undoubtedly a factor in Marx's decision to study political economy, the science in which his works have produced a veritable revolution (Lenin).
In 1848, Marx and Engels published the world-famous Manifesto of the Communist Party. In that year, as democratic revolutions broke out in Europe, both worked on the revolutionary newspaper, Neue Rheinische Zeitung. The Prussian state persecuted the paper and its editors, and expelled Marx from Germany.
In May 1849, Engels fought on the barricades in his homeland during an uprising. In June, he fought in another uprising. After Prussian troops crushed it, he fled to Switzerland. In 1850, Engels returned to Manchester, where he worked again in the Ermen & Engels spinning mill. Meanwhile he carried out revolutionary organizing, and supported Marx financially. Both men joined the International Workers Association, the First International, which helped workers' parties, newspapers and organizations worldwide.
During this period Marx began systematic work on the materialist criticism of bourgeois political economy, culminating in the first volume of Capital in 1867. Could Marx have done this without the constant professional and scientific advice and material support from Engels? It is doubtful. After Marx's death in 1883, Engels published two more volumes of Capital and was a leader of the international socialist and communist labor movement.
Engels fought for materialism
Marx and Engels rejected the preconceived idealist view that it is the development of the mind that explains the development of nature but that, on the contrary, the ideas of the mind must be derived from nature, from matter. ...Unlike Hegel and the other Hegelians, Marx and Engels were materialists. Regarding the world and humanity materialistically, they perceived that just as material causes underlie all natural phenomena, so the development of human society is conditioned by the development of material forces, the productive forces (Lenin, Frederick Engels 1895).
Lenin fought for Engels’ elaboration of this revolutionary-materialistic point of view in his great philosophical work Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. While Marx at that time worked his way further into the depths of the critique of political economy, Engels … dealt with general scientific problems and with diverse phenomena of the past and present in the spirit of the materialist conception of history and Marx's economic theory in works such as Anti-Dühring (analyzing highly important problems in the domain of philosophy, natural science and the social sciences), The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, The Peasant War in Germany, and other works
There are many stories about the generous, humorous, witty host, who was a disinterested helper to countless comrades. Engels put all his strength and inheritance at the disposal of the working class. “The European proletariat may say that its science was created by two scholars and fighters whose relationship to each other surpasses the most moving stories of the ancients about human friendship. Engels always … placed himself after Marx. … His love for the living Marx and his reverence for the memory of the dead Marx were boundless (Lenin “Fredrick Engels”).
Engels has no grave. “In accordance with Engels’s instructions his body was cremated and his ashes scattered in the sea …” (T. Carver, The Life and Thought of Fredrich Engels)
Friday, December 18, 2020 at 5:47PM The struggle continues to force the racist bosses to drop all charges against Black artist/organizer Jeremey “Mohawk” Johnson. Mohawk was attacked and arrested in August during an anti-kkkop protest in downtown Chicago with many others, and remains on house arrest connected to “aggravated assault.” Communists from Progressive Labor Party (PLP) have been active in trying to build this battle in the streets, courts, and our workplaces.
Friday, December 18, 2020 at 5:43PM Learning to fight for students
The pandemic has provided educators with opportunities to build some working-class muscles.
I teach at a high school with a 97 percent Black and Latin immigrant population. While our Black principal prides herself in being pro-student, she
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